HN Explorer

Dear GitHub/Microsoft, I'm open source programmer, I feed on stars

18 points by qa_acc ↗ HN
Today I logged in my Github account to discover that Microsoft evicted my feed panel where I was able to see the stars random user gave me and news about repository of my friend with just another bad imitation of twitter / tik tok to step further into the dystopian social nightmare we live in.

Now, dear Microsoft , I do program for free and that programs also make your fortune because you monetise them in your AI stuff so I find very annoying this your irrational attempt to deprive people like me even of the little pleasure and satisfaction given by reading the list of stars given to them by people around the world, people appreciating my job.

So be kind and move back our little star fee because we feed on them and if you are "social" ambition, build a Twitter clone that works like the old twitter, I think now is the time.

P.S. Apparently the old feed is still reachable at https://github.com/dashboard-feed, for now.

9 comments

[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 44.9 ms ] thread
satvikpendem
Do people actually care about stars or use GitHub as an actual social media platform? I just use it to host my code, I rarely even look at the dashboard.
verdverm
The feed always been pretty useless, though you could find some gems, most people use it to see what has happened to repos in their org or that they work on.

Now it is utter garbage, filled with random and unimportant content that has no relevance to the user. It's definitely moved to be more like the trash social media feeds that prioritize those items with the most engagement over those that are... maybe useful

I wonder if it's time we go back to git roots, decentralize (with a fork index?), and use git-notes for our PR workflows. Just need a nice UI on top of git-notes. Google recently put out a project, but the UI is quite basic and limited

zzo38computer
I personally don't use the stars, dashboard, feeds, etc at all, so they are of no concern to me. I only use it for mirrors of my public projects (the main repository is hosted on my own computer) and for issues/comments of other projects.
eternityforest
I don't care much about stars, they just mean someone thought it was vaguely interesting and probably forgot all about it.

Maybe they need an informal comment section. Comment sections are toilets, but also, having just random casual engagement with users would be interesting. People could say stuff they are too lazy to make into a proper feature request, and you could tell if people are actually using your app or just randomly starred.

Rochus
The stars are an immediate way to acknowledge the work of the authors of the project, and to demonstrate that there are people who consider their work important. I appreciate this kind of feedback as an open-source developer, though I wouldn't see or use Github as a social media platorm.
high_byte
seems like you can filter by stars on the homepage
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Rochus
Yes, there are more and more sites "improving" their form and functions, but actually the experience gets worse and in some cases I would have to switch to a new browser generation to get any results at all.

Why can't good just stay good?